Suleika Jaouad Quotes

“They say that in difficult times you find out who your friends are, but mostly I found out whom I wanted to befriend. Some people I thought I could count on disappeared, while others I barely knew did more than I ever expected.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 224)

“When life brings you to the floor, there is a choice: You can allow the worst thing that’s ever happened to you to hijack your remaining days, or you can claw your way back into motion.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 224)

“It took me a while to say I was a cancer patient. Then, for a long time, I was only that. It’s time for me to figure out who I am now.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 221)

“In my lowest moments, I fantasize about getting sick again. I miss the sense of purpose and clarity I felt while in treatment—the way staring your mortality straight in the eye simplifies things and reroutes your focus to what really matters. I miss the hospital’s ecosystem. Like me, everyone there was broken, but out here, among the living, I feel like an imposter, overwhelmed and unable to function.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 214)

“Moving on. It’s a phrase I obsess over: what it means, what it doesn’t how to do it for real. It seemed so easy at first, too easy, and it’s starting to dawn on me that moving on is a myth—a lie you sell yourself on when your life has become unendurable. It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past—that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding—and that all of this, when it catches up to you, won’t come for blood.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 208)

“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 190)

“Melissa painted self-portraits from bed; I wrote self-portraits from bed. Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain. We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 157)

“For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 122)

“We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ death appears in the plotline.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 119)

“I decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act. If the chemo sores in my mouth made it too painful to talk, I would find new ways to communicate. As long as I was stuck in bed, my imagination would become the vessel that allowed me to travel beyond the confines of my room. If my body had grown so depleted that I now had only three functional hours each day, I would clarify my priorities and make the most of how I spent the time I had.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 109)

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Excerpt: Pain is inevitable. How we channel pain, however, is a choice. This short story about Frida Kahlo will show you the gifts pain can provide.

“I’d always imagined myself as the kind of writer who would help other people tell their stories, but increasingly I found myself gravitating toward the first person. Illness had turned my gaze inward.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 107)

“People often respond to the news of tragedy with ‘words fail,’ but words did not fail me that day, or the next, or thereafter—they poured out of me, first cautiously, then exuberantly, my mind awakening as if from a long slumber, thoughts tumbling out faster than my pen could keep up.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 106)

“Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you and your anger, the crackle of exam table paper beneath bruised limbs, the way your heart pounds into your mouth when the doctor enters the room with the latest biopsy results.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 100)

“The logical mind tries to remind itself that sometimes you must suffer in order to feel better. But the body has its own memory: It remembers who hurt it. On an irrational level, I felt wronged by those whom I saw having ‘poisoned’ me (people in lab coats, phlebotomist, my mother) and by those who encouraged me to think positively about it (friends, Hallmark cards, the ‘cancer books’ section of Barnes & Noble). Finding the silver lining felt like part of the punishment.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 100)

“The land of the sick was no place for anyone to live 24/7; I would never have wished it upon my worst enemy. I knew that if I wanted our relationship to last, I would need to encourage Will to start living his life again.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 92)

“Time was a waiting room—waiting for doctors, waiting for blood transfusions and test results, waiting for better days. I tried to focus on the preciousness of the present: the moments when I was well enough to walk around the oncology unit with my parents, the sound of Will’s voice as he read out loud to me each night before bed, the weekends when my brother came to visit from college—all of us together now, while it was still possible. But try as I might, I couldn’t help but feel an incipient grief and guilt as my thoughts turned, inevitably, to what would happen to Will and my family if I didn’t survive.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 91)

“Living with a life-threatening illness turned me into a second-class citizen in the land of time. My days were a slow emergency, my life dwindling to four white walls, a hospital bed, and fluorescent lights, my body punctured by tubes and wires tethering me to various monitors and my IV pole. The world outside my window seemed farther and farther away, my field of vision shrinking to a tiny pinpoint.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 91)

“Over time, I grew allergic to the looks of pity and the positivity pushers who tried to cheer me up with their get-well cards and their exhausting refrains of ‘stay strong’ and ‘keep fighting.’ I began to feel angry at people’s trivial complaints about a stressful day at the office or a broken toe that meant they couldn’t go to the gym for a couple of weeks, and it was hard not to feel left out when my friends told me about a concert or a party they’d been to together.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 76)

“It’s a funny thing, coming home. Everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same, but you are different; the contrast between who you were when you left and who you are now is heightened against the backdrop of old haunts.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 42)